Material Girls

“W.E.” and “Albert Nobbs.”

What drew Madonna to make a film about an ambitious, hard-lacquered American woman who sought to carve out a place in British society through pure steeliness of character we shall, of course, never know. But the result is “W.E.,” which joins the initials of Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough) and King Edward VIII (James D’Arcy). The story is familiar: eligible prince marries divorcée and thereby surrenders his chance to bring the English throne into disrepute. Noël Coward said that a statue should be erected to Mrs. Simpson on every village green in the land, because in extracting Edward she had saved the nation from disaster.

In truth, “W.E.” is not one film but two, stuck together. There is the tale of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, as W. and E. became, intercut with that of Wally Winthrop (Abbie Cornish), a wretchedly married woman living in Manhattan in the late nineteen-nineties and fixated on the myth of Mrs. Simpson. Her black hair, combed and pinned like Wallis’s, is as shiny as shellac; her clothes are an exercise in rigid monochrome; and she keeps drifting through Sotheby’s, either making eyes at a Russian security guard (Oscar Isaac)—who is also, we are assured, “an intellectual”—or mooning over a display of Windsor memorabilia. The baubles, furniture, and clothes are then sold at one of those auctions where the wealthy are applauded, by their confrères, for the brio of their expenditure: a scene filmed by Madonna without an inch of critical distance. I guess that, in her mind, the ten grand that Wally coughs up for a few pairs of Mrs. Simpson’s used gloves counts as small potatoes.

Recent reports from Liverpool claimed that irate moviegoers had come out of “The Artist” complaining that there were no words in it, and asking for their money back. In the same spirit, I hereby demand a refund for “W.E.,” because of its outrageous lack of sex. What on earth is the point of a Madonna product, in any medium, if it contains not a single orgy? The notion of a bored Manhattan wife being hit on by a uniformed Russian brute is just the kind of solid, old-fashioned fantasy that Madonna, in her corseted pomp, would have fed into a pop video. But “W.E.” is shockingly chaste, remaining tight-lipped and cross-legged even in the infamous matter of what Wallis may have done to steam the royal blood.

It didn’t have to be this way. What Madonna should have done, for the historical scenes, is to buy the movie rights to “Full Service” (Grove Press), a new memoir by Scotty Bowers. He made his reputation by sleeping with everyone in Hollywood who wasn’t actually Lassie, and now he tells all. If you ever suspected that Spencer Tracy was bisexual and Tyrone Power a coprophiliac, and if you happen to believe everything you read, here is all the testimony you require. Bowers takes particular pride in the services that he performed for, and with, the Duke and Duchess on a visit to America: “Essentially, he was gay and she was a dyke.” Ah, happy days:

We would have a mixture of half a dozen males and females engage in a display of gay and straight sex in the bungalow and then Eddy, Wally, and I would each pair off with the one we fancied most.

It sounds rather like Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace, and one knows exactly what Edward’s mother, Queen Mary, would have said: “My dear, they did it in a bungalow.”

I was starting to think that the marriage of Wallis and Edward was one of those relationships, like that of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, of which we have heard enough, and that all books and films on the topic should be outlawed, for fear of public inanition. But Bowers’s reveries have fanned the flames, and it is a shame that Madonna should come along and douse them. To be fair, “W.E.” has two blessings. First, the costume design, by Arianne Phillips, is immaculate, as befits the late Duchess, who realized that, in a hostile world, all suits are suits of armor. Second, Andrea Riseborough works marvels in the leading role. With her sizable eyes and her capacity to seem at once helplessly expressive and fiercely controlling, she is both a credible Wallis and, more important to lovers of film, one of the few young actresses bold enough to channel Bette Davis. But she needs a more astute director than Madonna, and a much better film than “W.E.” With its restless parade of grainy closeups, the movie is a haze of retro rapture and wishful thinking, and, above all, a lost opportunity. We don’t want to hear any more about ancient constitutional crises. We want to watch a three-way with a former King of England, in a bungalow. Madonna, of all people, missed a trick.

The title role in “Albert Nobbs” goes to Glenn Close, who played it Off Broadway thirty years ago and has striven ever since to bring it to the screen. She co-wrote and co-produced the film, and is seldom out of our sight. But what do we see? Albert is a woman dressed as a man, in the Ireland of the late eighteen-hundreds, yet what Close serves up is neither man nor woman, flesh nor fowl, but a strange hieratic hybrid of no discernible identity. She walks as though freshly risen from the dead, patrolling the streets and corridors in a stiffened glide, with those dark, deep-sunk eyes of hers staring hard ahead. Albert is a waiter in an upmarket Dublin hotel, and the uniform adds starch to her otherworldliness: grief-black suit and tie, snowy shirt, and, for outdoors, a rolled umbrella and an ill-fitting bowler hat. What you feel, watching Close, is not that you are watching gender being bent into new, absorbing shapes but that you might as well have stayed home and leafed through a book on Magritte.

The hotel is run by Mrs. Baker (Pauline Collins), aflutter with aspirational cooing, while a colorful cast, including Brendan Gleeson and Brenda Fricker, portrays the other residents. Gleeson is as reliably rooted as ever, depicting a boozy and bearded quack named Holloran, who dines with the guests but, when the fancy moves him, breakfasts with the domestics—one of whom, moreover, he gorges on in bed. Joyce would have known the type.

Throughout the movie, too much time and fuss are expended on a dull romance between a roseate maid (Mia Wasikowska) and a handyman (Aaron Johnson), although the director, Rodrigo García, may have been forced in this direction simply because he could not find enough to do with his central character. Albert’s vision of quitting the hotel and opening a tobacconist’s shop, for example, is delivered not once but on repeated occasions as an actual vision, robed in a golden glow, and the thoughts that float across her, or his—or, if we are honest, its—mind are muttered out loud, in soliloquy. While formulating an unlikely plan, for instance, that she will propose to the maid, Albert stops and asks, with nobody in earshot, “Should I tell her before we are married or save it for the wedding night?”

Such awkwardness is, to an extent, inevitable; it shows Close and her collaborators bumping into the age-old conundrum of how best to represent interior monologue onscreen. The film is adapted from a short story by George Moore, which appeared in a 1927 volume called “Celibate Lives.” There Albert describes herself as a “perhapser,” but the problem with such indecision, as voiced by Close, is that it makes Albert sound like a simpleton, regardless of the agonies that may be imposed upon society by the need for sexual choice. That is why “Albert Nobbs” awakes so bracingly whenever Janet McTeer marches into view. She plays Hubert Page, a housepainter who comes to redecorate the hotel and has to share a bed with Albert. By a merry coincidence, Hubert, too, turns out to be a woman underneath, baring an unmistakable and frankly regal bosom to make her point.

It says much for McTeer that the obvious question—“What are the chances of two cross-dressers meeting trouser to trouser in late-nineteenth-century Dublin?”—hardly enters our minds. Stately and swaggering, taller than most of the men, and sporting the dark forelock of the natural rake, McTeer, who has been Oscar-nominated for best supporting actress, carries conviction as easily as she wears her breeches and corduroy jacket, transforming Hubert’s rangy physical confidence into a larger embrace of life’s amusements and kicks. She is no perhapser but a thoroughgoing yes-woman, like Molly Bloom. The sad thing is that, from the opening shot of a guttering flame, “Albert Nobbs” prefers to take its cue—timorous, subdued, and reluctant to risk a smile—from the title character. Imagine a different film on a similar theme, with Hubert moved to center stage and García replaced by Pedro Almodóvar, for whom cross-dressers in a Catholic country would be meat and drink. Poor Albert could then retreat into the shadows, where he so evidently belongs, emerging only to pour the wine and clear away the feast. ♦

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